Apartheid Remains: A Talk with Sharad Chari

While it is a truism that post-Apartheid South Africa is still wrestling with a long history of colonialism, segregation and racial capitalism, we know less about how people handle the remains of the past. This talk by Sharad Chari (University of California, Berkeley) lays out what remains of various periods in a long 20th century of racial capitalism and struggle, particularly in “Indian” and “Coloured” neighborhoods in the shadows of oil refineries in the Indian Ocean city of Durban in South Africa. Through an analysis of four moments in the heightened conjuncture of anti-apartheid struggle in the 1970s and 1980s, four ways in which people sought quite differently to transform, transcend, or destroy Apartheid’s geographies, Chari suggests how the post-Apartheid predicament challenges our conception of an urban, oceanic and postracial planetary future.

Sharad Chari is the author of Fraternal Capital: Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press and Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004) and co-editor with Stuart Corbridge of The Development Reader (UK: Routledge, 2008). He is currently completing a book manuscript title Apartheid Remains, a portion of which he will present at today’s talk.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Metropolitan Studies and the Urban Democracy Lab. Free and open to the public.